Be the e-mailer you wish to see in the world

How many people do you receive e-mail from that you read and reply to every single time?

I’m guessing it’s just a handful: Your best friend — the one who sends you short periodic updates with a single recent photo, not the one who sends you weekly 2-pagers. The super-smart former colleague, now a rising star at another firm, who e-mails you two or three times a year with useful introductions or a succinct request for help you can actually provide. The client who sends you the latest round of project notes in a friendly, tightly-edited bullet list. And maybe, for the sake of self-preservation, your boss (unless your boss is one of those 45-separate-emails-a-day types, at which point I bet you’re doing some subject line-based triage.)

What do these correspondents have in common? Each one offers:

A benefit for reading each message: it’s pleasurable or it helps you do your job better/more efficiently

A limited claim on your attention (both in the frequency and length of messages)

Emotional gratification: the tone of their messages reinforces your positive feelings about your relationship (and if your boss consistently writes in a way that doesn’t make you feel positive, it’s time to consider a move)

In other words, each of these correspondents provides a high return on investment — either because the time required to read their correspondence is very low, or the pay-off is relatively high (compared to the other messages in your inbox).

This is the kind of e-mail correspondent we should each aspire to be. But it’s not something you can achieve by signing a manifesto or adding a sig line that says “I hope you enjoyed this friendly, concise and valuable message.”

You’ve got to get there by actually writing the kind of messages you want to receive — and only those messages. You’ve got to ask three questions of each message you send, before you send it:

What problem does this e-mail solve, or what benefit does it offer, for the person I’m writing to?

Could I make this e-mail shorter? If I’m going to e-mail this person again today or this week, could I usefully combine multiple messages into one?

Does the tone of this e-mail reflect my affection and respect for the person I’m writing to?

Ask yourself these three questions, and you can become the kind of e-mailer you wish to see in the world. If we each work towards that goal, we can look forward to a day when opening our inboxes is a moment of delight rather than dread.

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About me

I am the Vice-President of Social Media for Vision Critical and the author of the Work Smarter with Social Media series for Harvard Business Review Press. My writing, speaking and research focus on how people and organizations can work smarter and live better by making effective use of social media. I blog about social media for the Harvard Business Review, and I am represented for speaking engagements by the Lavin Agency. The views on this blog are my own, and do not represent Vision Critical or any other organization or publication.